The New Monthly Magazine and Humorist, 1847 - "Agnes Grey" is a simple tale of a governess’s experiences and trials of love, borne with that meekness, and met by that fortitude, that insure a final triumph.
Never was there a period in our history of Society when we English could so ill afford to dispense with sunshine. In the tale is so much feeling for character, and nice marking of scenery, that we cannot leave it without warning its author against what is eccentric and unpleasant. In the household of the Bloomfields the governess is subjected to torment by Terrible Children (as the French have it) in that of the Murrays she has to witness the ruin wrought by false indulgence on two coquettish girls, whose coquetries jeopardize her own heart's secret. Anne's life was cut short when she died of pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of 29.ĭaguerreotype, 1847 - Agnes Grey is a tale of a governess who undergoes much that is in the real bond of a governess's endurance:- but the new victim's trials are more of a ignoble quality than those awaited Jane Eyre. She wrote a volume of poetry with her sisters (Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, 1846) and two novels: Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which is considered to be one of the first sustained feminist novels, appeared in 1848. After leaving her teaching position, she fulfilled her literary ambitions. At the age of 19 she left Haworth and worked as a governess between 18. For a couple of years she went to a boarding school. The Irish novelist George Moore praised Agnes Grey as "the most perfect prose narrative in English letters," and went so far as to compare Anne's prose to that of Jane Austen.Īnne Brontë, daughter of a poor Irish clergyman in the Church of England, lived most of her life with her family at the parish of Haworth on the Yorkshire moors.
The novel deals with issues of oppression and abuse of women and governesses, isolation and ideas of empathy.
Like her sister Charlotte's novel Jane Eyre, it addresses what the precarious position of governess entailed and how it affected a young woman. The novel, based on Anne Brontë's own experiences as a governess for five years, describes Agnes Grey as she works in several families. Agnes Grey was first published in December 1847 and republished in a second edition in 1850.
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